Ukraine retakes territory from ‘risk averse’ Russia
Britain intelligence: Russia lost a quarter of its invading army
AUkraine counteroffensive pushed Russian forces 40km east of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, US officials said yesterday. They also said Russian gains in Donbas had been “minimal at best” and “quite frankly anaemic”, and President Vladimir Putin’s troops appeared to be displaying a risk aversion to casualties.
A senior US defence official said: “They were hoping to get Kharkiv and hold it.”
The official also said that in areas of Donbas they were “moving in and then declaring victory, and then withdrawing their troops only to let the Ukrainians take it back.
“There’s a casualty aversion that we continue to see by the Russians now.”
The official said Russian advances in the Donbas were “very cautious, very tepid”.
He said about 70 of the 90 155mm howitzers promised to Ukraine had now been delivered, along with tens of thousands of rounds, and training for Ukrainian soldiers.
Amid reports that General Valery Gerasimov, the head of Russia’s armed forces has been killed in Ukraine, US officials said he did visit the Donbas last week, but they could not confirm reports he was wounded.
It came as British intelligence officials said Russia has lost a quarter of its invading army in its botched occupation of Ukraine.
Some of Moscow’s most elite units, including its Airborne Forces, have suffered the highest levels of attrition in the first 68 days of the conflict while one quarter of Russia’s forces used in the invasion was now “combat ineffective”.
The Kremlin has committed more than 120 battalion tactical groups, each numbering between 600 to 1000 soldiers, to Ukraine, which amounts to about 65 per cent of Russia’s entire ground combat
strength, according to the report.
The Ministry of Defence said it would “probably take years for Russia to reconstitute these forces”.
On Monday, unconfirmed local reports from the southern port city of Odesa said that a 15-year-old boy was killed and a 17-year-old girl was injured in a Russian rocket attack.
The rocket, apparently aimed at a military facility, also damaged a nearby monastery.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian drone destroyed two Russian patrol boats in the Black Sea off Snake Island, a rocky outcrop that became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance in the early days of the Russian invasion.
Footage released by the Ukrainian military shows the Turkish-made Bayraktar drone hitting the two Russian Raptor-class patrol vessels that can be used for landing troops.
Across the border in Belgorod, used as the Kremlin’s staging post for its invasion, more explosions were reported after a series of unexplained attacks on infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities tried to evacuate a second group of civilians from Mariupol’s besieged Azovstal steel works after 100 people were able to leave the plant after taking shelter in its sprawling network of bunkers for several weeks.
Vadym Boichenko, the mayor of Mariupol, said on Ukrainian television that 100 people were able to leave the city’s basements yesterday and were awaiting an evacuation to a safe place.
“This is supposed to happen, and we’re waiting for the enemy troops to let it happen today.”
Authorities in the self-proclaimed separatist statelet of Donetsk said 214
people, including 33 children, left Mariupol that day for a separatistcontrolled area.
Ukrainian officials did not confirm the reports. The evacuation may have been complicated by reports of renewed shelling in the city.
Denys Shlega, a Ukrainian National Guard brigade commander in Mariupol, told Ukrainian TV that Russian forces had started shelling the plant after a two-day break.
“There are still hundreds of civilians including about 20 children in Azovstal’s bunkers, according to our calculations,” he said.
Putin, in response to numerous pleas to cease fire around the Azov Sea city that has been obliterated by weeks of Russian airstrikes, insisted in recent days Russia was no longer shelling Mariupol.
— Telegraph Group Ltd